Jill DuffyTinyCards by DuolingoTinyCards, a free app from Duolingo, helps you study with digital flashcards and quizzes. It has some problems, though, and there are better alternatives for language learning.

Free. Can build your own flash card deck. Includes language vocabulary from Duolingo.

Cons

Flashcard decks built by others are unreliable and prone to errors. Little variety in study method, quizzes.

Bottom Line

TinyCards, a free app from Duolingo, helps you study with digital flashcards and quizzes. It has some problems, though, and there are better alternatives for language learning.

TinyCards is a free flashcard and study companion app to Duolingo. It primarily helps you study foreign language vocabulary that you learned in Duolingo, although there are other topics you can study, too. Words from Duolingo lessons are preloaded into the app, and you can run through flashcard decks of them anytime you like from a mobile app or web browser. You can also build your own flashcard decks or study material uploaded by other users. As a free language learning app, TinyCards is of average quality. Its main draw is that the vocabulary words come from Duolingo, so you can use it in conjunction with a Duolingo course. Still, TinyCards has a few frustrating flaws. A similar app called Memrise is better, and therefore our Editors' Choice for free language study apps.

Free vs. The Competition

TinyCards is entirely free to download and use. There are no upsells, no premium accounts, and no features to unlock. You can use as many flashcard decks as you want. You get flashcard decks from Duolingo, as well as any you decide to create, and those created by other users. That said, it's a no-frills experience, as I'll explain. The study portion involves drilling through flashcards, answering multiple choice questions, writing short answers, and simple quizzes. You don't get anything else. There are no games, no alternative ways to learn, no visual aids.

Duolingo, the companion online language-learning program, has been free since its inception, although in 2017 the app became ad-supported, and the company rolled out a $9.99 Plus option for people who use the mobile app. (Web users haven't been affected by this change as of this writing, just iOS and Android users.) The company introduced in-app ads and a Plus membership option because its other business models weren't working. In any event, the Plus membership keeps Duolingo ad-free and lets you save lessons offline. Anyone can still use the app for free, but if you don't pay, you will see ads and there's no longer an option to save lessons locally to your phone or tablet.

Memrise, which I mentioned previously, is better than TinyCards because it offers more interaction and there's more variety in content. Memrise is also free on mobile devices and the web. There is a Premium Memrise account for $9.99 per month that adds a few perks, but honestly, you get so much with the free account that you don't really need it.

Busuu, another language study app, offers flashcards on the web for free. You have to pay for a busuu Premium account to get more features and course material, such as mobile apps with offline content, grammar exercises, and quizzes.

Busuu isn't as expensive as Memrise or Duolingo, but only when you pay for a one- or two-year subscription upfront for $69.99 (equivalent to $5.83 per month) or $119.99 (equivalent to $4.99 per month), respectively.

Languages Included

Note: All language learning material mentioned here is for English speakers studying another language. Many of these apps also offer courses in English for speakers of other languages, and may also have courses for other speakers, too (such as French for Spanish speakers). I do not include mention of those courses here.

TinyCards has study material for many languages, but they are not all equal. Some of the material comes from Duolingo courses, as mentioned, and some comes from users who upload it. For example, TinyCards has flashcard decks for the following Duolingo courses: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. You might notice that this list is much smaller than all the languages supported in Duolingo. In addition, TinyCards has flashcard decks for Duolingo's Russian Cyrillic writing, American Sign Language alphabet, and Japanese writing for Katakana and Hiragana. These decks are just for the writing and alphabets.

The other language study material in TinyCards has been uploaded by other users, not by Duolingo. I found a small set of cards for Romanian, for example, that was uploaded by a stranger, despite the fact that Duolingo does have a Romanian course. I gave the Romanian deck a shot, but there is no guarantee that the user who created this deck made it accurate. With the material uploaded by Duolingo, I at least have some assurance that the material will be of good quality.

Similar to Duolingo, Memrise has language material that the company has officially added, as well as content added by users, and the latter is not validated for accuracy either. The language courses officially added by Memrise are: Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Spanish (European and Mexican), and Turkish. As with TinyCards, Memrise lets you study more than one deck at a time at no cost.

Busuu has content for: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. With busuu's free account, however, you only get flashcards for one language at a time.

Drill and Kill

To try out TinyCards, I started with decks for Romanian and German words. Later, I opted into studying some other topics beyond just languages.

TinyCards works by showing you flashcards first (new word on one side and translation on the other), and then asking you to recall the information, either with a multiple choice question or by having you write the word or its English translation. When you get a card wrong, the app makes sure you encounter the same card again, and soon. Depending on how often you got it wrong, the app might also give you a hint as to the answer. In this way, it's a smart flashcard app that adapts to your abilities as you study.

The overall experience is fine, but dull. There are no visuals or game-like elements. Memrise at least has optional memes to help you remember new vocabulary. The memes are visual cards that you or other users make to help you remember a new word through some silly association. Honestly, they're often lame, but some of them are quite funny or absurd, which can make them memorable. When you find a meme you like, you can save it to the vocabulary word as a kind of hint the next time you can't remember the translation. TinyCards doesn't have anything like this.

I understand that drilling through flashcards isn't meant to be thrilling, but it's pretty boring in TinyCards. You learn only a few new words at a time, and you can't change how many words you get per session. I understand that limiting the number of words a learner sees in any given session is supposed to help the learner retain information, but it's frustrating for anyone who already has a substantial vocabulary. Additionally, while the content in Duolingo and TinyCards is largely the same, your account is not synced between the two apps. Your TinyCards account has no idea where you are in your learning path in Duolingo. It would make a whole lot more sense to synchronize the two apps.

With my German flashcard decks, I probably could have blown through several dozen words before encountering new words that I didn't know yet or had learned through exposure but still needed to study. And I was eager to get to the hard stuff! Alas, I found myself flipping through words I already knew. There's no way to jump ahead. There's also no way to increase the number of vocabulary words you see in any one session, which you can do in Memrise.

With TinyCards you can create your own decks, too, which might be the better route for more experienced learners. When you build your own deck, you can fill it with words that are new to you or that you need to repeat. But this solution has some flaws, too. Depending on what language you're learning and what device you're using at the moment, you might not have all the characters you need at your fingertips. Figuring out how to type characters that aren't standard on your installed keyboard, or figuring out how to swap between different keyboards, is a royal pain in the ass and a waste of time. In creating my own deck of flashcards, I would have loved an option to select special characters that would always appear on screen for me to select, eliminating the headache of actually typing the non-standard characters.

Rather than deal with special characters, I decided to build a flashcard deck of Romanian words that only used letters that are also found in the English alphabet. I may not be able to spell the Romanian word for "bread," but I got "carrot" down!

Another problem that came up was that I had two Romanian words with the same English translation. I didn't think much about this fact when creating the deck, but it came back to bite me in the ass when I had to come up with the Romanian word for "vegetables." There were two possible correct answers and no way to know which translation would be the right one for this particular card. TinyCards should give you the option to indicate that there are multiple correct answers, but it doesn't. That option doesn't exist in Memrise or Quizlet either. I sure would like to be able to say "bye" in more ways than one.

When creating flashcard decks of your own, you can't import existing files using TinyCards. Similarly, you can't export your decks. Most other flashcard apps of this variety, such as Quizlet, allow you to import and export tab-delimited or comma-delimited files.

My decks were worse off due to these inconveniences… but the decks other people created were truly atrocious! A flashcard set on the capitals of Europe, for example, was rife with spelling errors. Did you know that Sarajevo is the capital of "Bodnia and Herzegovina," or that Riga is the capital of "Larvia?" Tbilisi, it just so happens, is the capital of "Geogia." I could go on.

I flagged the errors using a tool the app provides and saw a pop-up message that the author of the deck would be alerted. Great, but two weeks later, the errors are all still there. I can tolerate a spelling error or two, but they become truly annoying when the erroneously spelled answer is the only correct answer that's accepted. There's simply no quality control over the decks that other people create, and finding so much bad content dragged down my whole experience with TinyCards.

Fairly Average

As a free language-learning and study app, TinyCards is average (which says something about the landscape of apps in this category to be sure). TinyCards has potential to be better, seeing as it could sync with your progress in Duolingo, but there are too many problems with it currently. Many of the problems aren't difficult to solve, but there are a lot of them. Stick with Memrise for language study and flashcards, as it's the Editors' Choice. Duolingo remains a wonderful free option for learning a new language on your own, too. It's also an Editors' Choice for free language learning apps.

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About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

TinyCards by Duolingo

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